WARRINGTON TWP — Throughout the past six decades the Route 202 Parkway has gone from idea to concept to drawing board to construction site. As of Monday afternoon, it’s finally a reality.

State, local and federal officials gathered Dec. 3 to officially open the new Parkway, a road opening that Lt. Governor Jim Cawley said he had been waiting for years to see become a reality.

“This 202 Parkway represents the state’s newest roadway. It brings a badly needed infusion of capacity along a very busy corridor. It will reduce congestion, and enhance traffic flow, and in the next decade there will be over 30,000 vehicles a day that’ll be using this roadway,” he said.

Cawley headlined a ribbon-cutting ceremony featuring elected officials from all along the nine-mile route, which built two lanes of traffic, bike and pedestrian paths to connect Route 63 in Lower Gwynedd with Route 611 in Doylestown Township, Bucks County.

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Joining the officials — and first to drive on the new Parkway — were a procession of roughly two dozen classic cars, led by 82-year-old Elmer Fox of Chalfont driving a 1930 Chrysler Model 70.

“I’ve been waiting for this for a long time, because of the fact that we’ve got so much traffic through Chalfont,” said Fox.

“Around 5 p.m., boy, it’s bumper to bumper and trucks and everything else, and this will pull all of that stuff out of there,” he said.

Fox and his fellow classic car enthusiasts drove north along the Parkway in a chronological procession, with his ’30 Chrysler followed by a 1946 Ford Coupe, a ’52 Pontiac sedan, a ’66 Chevy Impala, ’70 Mustang, 1980 DeLorean and others. Each followed Fox across the George W. Niblock bridge, named for a longtime Bucks County resident who helped start the planning in the late 1950s and early ’60s for what ultimately became the Parkway project.

Niblock and Robert Cotton, a New Britain resident who sat on an initial steering committee in 1968 to plan the Parkway’s route, both took part in a ribbon cutting alongside Cawley and elected officials from both sides of the border. They spoke about the importance of bipartisan efforts and communication across the aisle and at all levels of state government in getting the parkway from drawing board to reality — a project that state Secretary of Transportation Barry Schoch said should be a model for others statewide.

“We don’t do much of this these days, we’re more about rebuilding than we are about new roads, but later this afternoon we’re going to make travel in Bucks and Montgomery counties a lot better for motorists,” Schoch said.

State Rep. Kate Harper, R-61st District, spoke about the benefit to each driver who uses the new Parkway, and how that will impact each person’s family in a different way.

“Millions of ordinary people will benefit from this project every single day, from the mother who gets home to make dinner 15 minutes earlier, to the dad who gets to that Little League game just in time to see his son come up at bat,” she said.

Rep. Kathy Watson, R-144th District, held up copies of newspapers dating as far back as 1951 with stories about discussions on the parkway, and Sen. Chuck McIlhinney, R-10th District, said he was glad to see the Parkway complete so that constituents’ questions about when it would open can now be answered.

State Sen. Stewart Greenleaf, R-12th District, credited officials at the township level for standing behind the project during years it looked unlikely to happen, and said if those municipalities had not protected their project rights-of-way, “this project would not have happened.”

Rep. Marquerite Quinn, R-143rd, joked with Rep. Todd Stephens, R-153rd, that each would take traffic from the other’s areas now that a direct route between Doylestown and Montgomery Township has opened. Stephens pointed out that the parkway “is terrific, it works both ways, and we look forward to that bidirectional travel” as a result of bipartisan cooperation.

While most of Monday’s commentary on the project was praise and enthusiasm, one spectator shared a different opinion. Resident Larry Shaeffer of Doylestown held a sign reading, “This road is a $300 million scam during the ribbon-cutting ceremony, and said the $200 million figure cited by PennDOT and elected officials had finished much higher for questionable benefit.

“We need transportation dollars desperately to improve safety all over this region, and yet they’re spending over $300 million on an unnecessary road. We don’t need more roads; we need less cars,” Shaeffer said.

Intersections at the intersection of the Parkway and Route 152 in Chalfont and 63 in Upper Gwynedd are the heaviest congestion points on the road, according to Shaeffer, and were discussed but not addressed in the planning process.

“World-renowned engineering firms offered up alternatives to address the congestion, and they were dismissed out of hand by the powers that be, because they said, ‘We don’t want congestion relief; we want a new road,’” he said.

County Commissioner Leslie Richards said that not only the elected officials deserved thanks — the planners, engineers, architects, contractors and consultants who worked on the project earned appreciation, too. She singled out the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission in particular for planting a seed that grew into the Parkway project with a feasibility study in the late 1980s.

“That study showed that PennDOT could still build and widen a new and existing (Route) 202 between Norristown and Montgomeryville to Doylestown, and that $50,000 study has led to a quarter-billion dollar investment in this project. As you can see, that was money well spent,” she said.

For more information on the 202 Parkway visit www.US202-700.com or follow @202Parkway on Twitter.